New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

The articles in this volume are based on presentations at ''Language Contact inTimes of Globalization'', held at the University of Groningen in September 2006.In their introduction, the editors emphasize the widening scope of languagecontact studies, which ranges from the detailed investigation of a singlecontact situation to cross-linguistic comparison of contact phenomena, and whichextends to the social effects that language contact can trigger in communities.These ten articles, which span a variety of language families, researchmethodologies, and subfields of linguistics, give the reader a taste of thediversity of the work being done on contact phenomena and at the same time raisemany questions for future research.

1. Pieter Muysken: Ethnolects as a multidimensional phenomenon

In the opening paper, Muysken proposes a broad framework for the'multidimensional' study of ethnolects, varieties of a language spoken byparticular ethnic groups. Using primarily examples from the Dutch 'Roots ofEthnolects' project, he provides examples demonstrating that ethnolects areaffected by properties of second language acquisition, linguistic marking ofidentity, language mixing, and properties of the ''original'' language of theethnic group, but that ethnolects cannot be sufficiently defined by any of theseindividually. While much work on ethnolects focuses on direct comparison of theethnic variety with the 'standard' variety of the dominant language, Muyskenproposes complementing these studies with a framework that takes intoconsideration the following factors: the local variety of the 'original'language of an ethnic group (L1); crossing or mixing between the original andthe ambient language (L1/L2); 'universal principles' of simplification ofgrammatical elements (UP); and approximation to the ambient language (L2). It isnot clear where sociolinguistic factors might fit into this framework, and inparticular which dimensions would be relevant for speakers of ethnolects who arenot necessarily speakers of the ''original'' language but who still are speakersof a pronounced ethnic dialect, and whose stylistic choices may even drivedialect change (cf. Mendoza-Denton 1997 on 'Chicano English'). Nevertheless,Muysken's framework definitely allows for more nuance than a single-dimensioncomparison with the ambient language and can be extended beyond ethnolects topractically any contact language situation.

Nerbonne et al. present the results of a computational project comparing thesurface syntax of first and second generation Finnish Australian Englishspeakers. Using automated coding of parts of speech of transcribedconversational corpora, the program extracted groups of three words and theircorresponding parts of speech for the two groups, allowing the authors toidentify and quantify patterns of deviation in the distribution of parts ofspeech. The automated technique has the additional advantage that it not onlyreveals the speech errors of L2 speakers, but also identifies and gives areliable measure of overuse of certain (correct) constructionsdisproportionately favored by L2 speakers, a phenomenon not easily addressedusing traditional linguistic analysis. The authors go on to discuss the resultsin the context of language contact, showing that some, but not all, of thediscrepancies are attributable to the speakers' L1 (Finnish). The presentationis very non-technical, the focus being to present discussion of the results to alinguistic audience and, perhaps more importantly, to show how techniques fromspeech technology can be used to answer linguistic questions not usuallyaddressed with computational methodologies.

3. Ricardo Otheguy, Ana Celia Zentella and David Livert: Generationaldifferences in pronominal usage in Spanish reflecting language and dialectcontact in a bilingual setting

The volume continues with another article comparing syntactic structures infirst and second generation immigrants, this time focusing on null vs. overtsubject pronoun use in the Spanish spoken by newcomers to New York City. Usingas a data source the Otheguy-Zentella corpus of NYC conversational Spanish, theauthors find that overt pronoun use is higher among second-generation immigrantsthan it is among newcomers. Furthermore, speakers from the Caribbean showedslightly different manifestations of this pattern than those from the mainland:while for Caribbean Spanish speakers there is a larger increase in 1st and 3rdperson than there is for second person, for mainland speakers it is reversed:there is a larger increase for 2nd person than there is for 1st and 3rd person.The authors attribute the global increase in pronouns to influence from English,which almost always require overt subject pronouns, but which otherwise showsgeneral surface syntactic similarity to Spanish pronoun/verb use. This idea issupported by the fact that time spent in the city and knowledge of Englishcorrelate positively with higher overt pronoun use, while age of arrival andknowledge of Spanish correlate positively with higher null pronoun use. The'mirror image' effect of second-person pronouns is attributed to leveling of theCaribbean and Mainland dialects. Thus Spanish speakers in New York are adaptingnot only to English, but also to other dialects of Spanish.

This paper again focuses on variation of pronoun use by immigrants to the UnitedStates, this time looking at Estonian, which has two sets of personal pronouns,'long' and 'short,' and allows null subjects in the first and second persons.Data was collected via sociolinguistic interviews from three groups: two groupsof late bilinguals (World War II refugees who came over after secondary schooland new immigrants), and ''early bilinguals,'' WWII refugees who had typicallyarrived in the United States before secondary school. Reasons for variationbetween long and short pronouns were globally the same for American Estonianspeakers as for monolingual Estonian speakers; that is, determined by prominence(focus or contrast) and case. However, specific patterns of variation differedbetween the groups. As in Otheguy et al.’s study, early bilinguals showedgreater use of overt subject pronouns, perhaps again because of greateraccommodation to English. Some other interesting results were noted; forexample, group members who diverged from the pattern of their group often hadspeech closer to that of another group with whom they were in close contact.

5. A. Seza Doğruöz and Ad Backus: Turkish in the Netherlands: Development of anew variety?

This article focuses on potential effects of contact on conversational Turkishspoken by second-generation immigrants to the Netherlands. Working in theframework of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2005), the authors present examplesfrom conversations that are considered to be unconventional and show how some ofthe deviations from the standard variety appear to be able to be attributable tostructural influence from Dutch. For example, Turkish speakers in theNetherlands sometimes omitted case-markers on nouns that are case-marked instandard Turkish, which could be explained by the fact that Dutch does not markcase. However, when conversations with native Turkish speakers from Turkey wereanalyzed, similar unconventional constructions occurred, albeit less frequently,suggesting that the unconventional structures cannot be completely attributed toDutch influence. There are several types of structures that only occur inNetherlands Turkish speakers (word order patterns, addition of a lexical item,omission of possessives, and unconventional derivational morphemes), but asthese do not appear to be systematic, the authors conclude that there is notsufficient evidence to posit Dutch-influenced structural change in NetherlandsTurkish. Instead, they claim that the influence of Dutch is item-based, withunconventional constructions resulting from translations of equivalent Dutchexpressions.

The authors of this paper discuss how the distribution of loanwords in the Dutchand Swedish lexicons reflects the similarities and differences in the linguisticcontact situations of the languages throughout history. Based on carefullycontrolled corpora of speeches made in the European Parliament, words were codedfor loanword status and language of origin. The authors then analyze the databased on a combination of linguistic and historical facts: for example, theprevalence of French loanwords in Dutch reflects the greater extent of contactbetween Dutch and French populations than Swedish and French. On the other hand,Swedish has a large number of loanwords from Low German, while Dutch has almostnone, even though the two language communities had a similar amount of contactwith Low German-speaking communities in the Middle Ages. The authors argue thatthe reason for this is that the lexicons of Low German and Dutch were verysimilar, leaving little room for borrowing, while those of Low German andSwedish were considerably different.

7. Hélène B. Brijnen: The impact of German on Schleife Sorbian: the use of 'gor'in the Eastern Sorbian border dialect

This short article focuses on the use of the particle 'gor' in the Schleifedialect of Sorbian, a Slavic language which is spoken in a small patch ofEastern Germany and which has been surrounded by the German speakers since theMiddle Ages. After a summary of the sociolinguistic context of the language andits speakers, the author discusses the geographical distribution of 'gor,' aborrowing from the German 'gar,' pointing out that the particle occurs in LowerSorbian but is rare in Upper Sorbian. The fact that there are other Germanborrowings in Upper Sorbian dialects leads her to suggest that 'gor' was notborrowed because it did not fit with the phonological system of Upper Sorbian,which had no /g/. She also notes that while the German equivalent 'gar' can beused in both positive and negative contexts, in this dialect of Sorbian it isalmost always used in a negative context. Brijnen goes on to compare thecontemporary dialect to that of a nineteenth century writer, claiming thatcomparative study can shed light on the history of German as well as Sorbian,but leaves the details for future work.

Taking a quantitative approach to the relationship between linguistic andgeographic proximity, this article examines whether the dialects of Bulgarianwhich are closer to neighboring countries (Macedonia, Serbia, Romania, Greece,and Turkey) are phonologically more similar to the languages of these countries.The article is valuable not only for its analysis of the data, but also for itscomparison of three computational techniques for measuring phonologicalsimilarity. Each step of the analysis was carried out using 1) Levenshteindistance (the number of modifications necessary to change one string of soundsto another); 2) phone frequency method (PFM), which compares the frequency ofeach phone in comparable corpora (Hoppenbrouwers & Hoppenbrouwers 2001), and 3)feature frequency method (FFM), which compares the frequency of eachphonological feature in comparable corpora (Hoppenbrouwers & Hoppenbrouwers2001). Although the three techniques produced slightly different results,indicating the need for further examination, they generally concurred, showing acorrelation between linguistic similarity and geographic proximity with respectto Macedonian, Serbian and Romanian, while for Greek and Turkish there werenegative trends and correlations. The authors offer possible historical andsociolinguistic explanations for the lack of correlation for Greek and Turkish.

Shaw and Balusu present an in-depth report on the results of a study on the[ti]-[tʃi] distinction in Japanese loanwords in two generations of speakers.Analysis of target loanwords including the two sequences found that both younger(age 20-23) and older (50-56) speakers distinguish orthographic 'chi' from 'ti'(which occurs only in loanwords), with longer frication on 'chi' tokens andshorter frication on 'ti' tokens. The authors also found that the duration offrication in both categories is conditioned by prosody: for instance, accentedsyllables have longer frication than unaccented syllables. Although there is acontrast between [ti] and [tʃi] in each prosodic position, the older speakersshow overlap between the two categories when collapsed over all prosodicpositions: that is to say that a stressed [ti] could have more frication than anunstressed [tʃi]. However, for younger speakers, although prosodic effects arestill present in each category, [ti] and [tʃi] do not overlap. Interestingly, inthe older speakers, two [ti] categories seemed to emerge: loanwords which hadbeen introduced after the speaker had reached adulthood were more [ti]-like(less frication). The authors conclude that older speakers had acquired the[ti]-[tʃi] contrast later in life, while younger speakers learned it whilelearning their first language. Finally, the authors address the question of whythis particular non-native contrast might be preserved, while others (i.e. [r]vs. [l]) are not. They propose that there must be non-contrastive variationwithin a native category, such as the prosodic conditioning that occurs in thiscase, in order for non-native categories to form.

10. Nicola Borrelli: Translating cultures within the EU

Turning to a very different perspective on language contact, the final articlein the collection deals with the translation of European Union documents intodifferent member languages, in an attempt to understand ''to what extent thetranslations of Brussels' official documents mirror the specific nationalperspectives of their translators and how these localising spurs interact withthe general policies of the European Union'' (182). Borrelli focuses on theEnglish and Italian translations of an originally French video meant to promotethe European Constitution to the public. Citing specific examples of non-literaltranslations, the author concludes that the contrast between Italian'Euro-optimism' and UK 'Euro-scepticism,' as well as national cultural values(based on Hofstede's (2001) 'dimensions of cultural differences') is reflectedin the choices made by the translators. Some of the discrepancies are indeedinteresting; using texts from more than one translator in each language wouldprovide even more convincing evidence that the choices of wording are anindication of the cultural values of a nation, as claimed by the author, ratherthan the stylistic choices of an individual writer.

EVALUATION

In his opening article, Muysken proposes that ethnolects need to be analyzedfrom many perspectives, and the findings in this book attest to the need formultidimensional perspectives on language contact in general. The main strengthsof the volume are its broad coverage of many different facets of languagecontact, demonstrating effects that a first language can have on a second(Nerbonne et al.), a second language on a first (Otheguy et al., Kivik et al.,Doğruöz and Backus), areal effects that are not necessarily attributable toknowledge of a second language (Brijnen, Heeringa et al.), loanword phenomena(Gooskens et al., Shaw and Balusu), and translation studies (Borrelli). Thisdiversity gives the reader an idea of the many paths that the study of contactlinguistics can take (and points towards many more yet untraveled), even thoughthe lack of discourse between the papers causes it to read more as a sampling ofthe field than as a unified volume.

Although most of the studies are corpus-based, there is a nice breadth ofmethodology as well; for example, the two computational studies demonstrate thatautomated quantitative techniques can reveal previously undiscovered patternsabout both the syntax (Nerbonne et al.) and the sound systems (Heeringa et al.)of languages in contact, while detailed examinations of specific constructionsuncover processes not apparent on the surface (such as the sub-categorization ofJapanese /ti/ presented by Shaw and Balusu). Although some work is set within atheoretical framework (i.e. Construction Grammar), the focus of the majority ofthe articles is largely descriptive, followed by possible implications of thefindings for the language contact processes. As most of these articles are quiteself-contained, however, the reader is often left without sufficient evidence toevaluate the larger-scale claims. This is especially striking in light of thework of Doğruöz and Backus, who highlight the importance of control groups incorpus work: after presenting seemingly plausible speculation about contacteffects, they then show how these ideas are refuted by the fact that speakerswithout exposure to the ''contact'' language produce the same patterns.

The articles in this volume provide a rich source of interesting contactphenomena, too specific and nuanced to be encompassed by the blanket term''accommodation.'' The next step is to explore whether these patterns haveparallels across languages. In a field with such extraordinary breadth anddiversity, it is only by cross-linguistic comparison and extensive dialoguebetween researchers that it will be possible to begin to answer some of thebig-picture questions posed by many of the authors as areas for future research:for instance, which sorts of patterns or constructions are most susceptible tochange, and which are more resistant to contact influence. Addressing thesequestions will lead to a better understanding not only of language contact, butalso of first and second language acquisition, and this volume provides anexcellent starting point for exploring them in a systematic manner.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Jessamyn Schertz is a graduate student at the University of Arizona, on
leave this year for a research position with the European Union Sound to
Sense project at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her main
research interests lie in sociophonetics, the phonetics/phonology
interface, and the effect of language contact on sound systems.